Thomas Poppleton's survey and map of Baltimore, begun in 1812 and published in 1822, shaped and directed the geographical growth and development of Baltimore City. His story and the stories of those who lived and worked in and from his city (including its merchant marine) are the focus of this blog.

Monday, August 31, 2015

Stories
of life in a seafaring community in the first decades of the
Republic, from the perspective of an owner of the Robert Long House
(812 Ann Street, Fell's Point, Baltimore, Maryland), her family, and
a few of her neighbors

Romaine
Somervile, the indefatigable former director of the Maryland
Historical Society, and a leading Fell's Point preservationist, asked
me to contribute a talk and tour for the Preservation Society of
Fell's Point and Baltimore Heritage in celebration of the 250th
anniversary of the Robert Long House (812 Ann Street, Fell's Point).
What follows is an exploration of the first 60 or so years of
Fell's Point's history, focusing on the development of the community
and neighborhoods now largely lost from memory. It is not meant to
be complete, but rather suggestive of what can be known and how it
may alter or enhance our perceptions of what life was like on the
seafaring frontier of the United States.

The
use of the term “seafaring frontier” is intentional. Too often
the concept of the frontier in U. S. history is thought of as a
free-wheeling place ever moving westward where the essence of the
American character was forged and Democracy was born amidst
communities dominated by risk takers and speculators bent on
acquiring personal fortune. Such was true of the East Coast
seafaring community of Fell's Point, which was created by land
speculators, built by risk taking developers, and populated by men
and women who were not afraid to push beyond the predominant
boundaries of class and the law in their search for wealth and
personal freedom.

From
one perspective, the essay that follows is a belated valentine to
Jane Biays Travers and the occupants of Ann, Argyle Alley, and
Fountain Streets, Fell's Point, during the most prosperous days of
shipbuilding and sail. It focuses on what we can learn about the
history of the community from a wide range of sources, from maps to
tax lists and court cases, pointing to the need for a more
coordinated and sustainable approach to telling the stories of Fell's
Point and maintaining their sources in the virtual world of on-line
access.

In
addition to the story of the long time resident of the Robert Long
House and her brothers, prominent mercantile and political figures of
Fell's Point, it briefly touches on the lives of some of the ship
captain and ship building neighbors, John Smith, John Cock, Thomas
Kemp,, and George Gardner, along with that of the notorious slave
dealer, Austin Woolfolk and the commission merchant Henry Thompson of
Clifton Mansion fame, both of whom shipped slaves from Jackson's wharf.

It
also probes the mystery surrounding the location of the first safe
drinking water supply for the Point and the naming of Fountain
Street, as well as a brief glimpse into the hopes and aspirations of
a neighbor who lived on Argyle Alley, less than a block away from the
Robert Long house on Ann Street.

History
is best told in stories that resonate with the listener whether it is
through the written word or the virtual world of interactive web
sites and digital productions of sound and images.

While
how well history is presented is the key to good history, mastering
the sources with sufficient imagination to fill in the gaps of what
can or can’t be known is also critical to even a modicum of success
in creating and keeping an audience on-line, or awake in the lecture
hall. That also means that the stories of lost neighborhoods and
their residents are subject to change as new evidence is uncovered
and the interpretation of known sources is challenged. No historical
narrative in whatever form is definitive. That is the true
excitement and value of history, as long as the evidence cited is
sustained in supported archives, both physical and virtual.

Recently
the British Museum teamed up with the virtual construction software
company called “Mindcraft” , now owned by Microsoft, to encourage
people to build their own imaginary museums of history
(http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/museumcraft.aspx).
There you are enticed to create rooms full of museum exhibits,
explaining to your viewers what there is to see and why it is
important, whether it be the Rosetta Stone or simple wooden device
created by a white slave owner on Maryland’s Eastern Shore for
making Maryland Beaten Biscuits which his slaves sold for him for
cash in Baltimore. Perhaps the occupants of 812 Ann Street owned
one?

Hopefully
some day this concept of personal museum building will be extended to
the creation of sustainable electronic archives in which not only
will the sources of history be accessible on line, but also it will
contain a perpetual, dynamic and growing library of scholarship
written within those virtual museum walls that can be mined for
new stories and the re-telling of old. For example, a number of
years ago, I was asked to tell the story of a house in Annapolis
which had a remarkable history attached to it, most of which, with
careful digging in a wide variety of fragmentary sources, was proven
wrong (http://www.mdcathcon.org/10francisand
forthcoming essay) and replaced by an even more remarkable story.

Fortunately,
when asked to interpret the early history of one house in Fell’s
Point, 812 Ann Street, the sources did not undermine the existing
interpretation, but rather proved a sparse yet enticing beginning for
a study of its occupants and their neighbors. It is a history that
abounds in aggressive entrepreneurial activity by every level of
society in search of fortune and personal freedom. It is a history
of opportunity on the seafaring frontier of the United States where
ship joiners could become merchants, bankers, and political bosses, a
place where fortunes could be made and lost in the space of a few
years, depending upon the course of international conflicts and the
the degree of risk taken. It is a history in which a thirst for
knowledge and the skills to achieve it are paramount as is the desire
to display the newly acquired wealth in conspicuous consumption and
the ownership of property, both real and personal, which in a slave
based economy like Maryland, would prove to have dire consequences
for the society as a whole.

After
the first major bubble of economic expansion in Baltimore burst in
the banking scandal of 1819, Betsy Patterson Bonaparte, the daughter
of one of the wealthiest merchants in Baltimore and the rejected
bride of Napoleon’s brother, wrote her own brother her view of why
the high fliers of commerce and banking were ruined.

[To
quote Betsy, one merchant]
by this tragical event, [has] been severely punished for the folly
which led him to build and furnish with regal magnificence a palace.
I am sorry to express my conviction that General Smith’s fine
house, and the extravagant mode of living he introduced into
Baltimore caused the ruin of half the people in the place, who,
without this example, would have been contented to live in
habitations better suited to their fortunes; and certainly they only
made themselves ridiculous by aping expenses little suited to a
community of people of business. It is to be hoped that in [the]
future there will be no palaces constructed, as there appears to be a
fatality attending their owners, beginning with Robert Morris and
ending with Lem. Taylor. I do not recall a single instance, except
that of [William] Bingham, of any one who built one in America, not
dying a bankrupt.[Elizabeth
Patterson to William Patterson, May 22, 1823, as published in Eugene
L. Dider, The Life and Letters of Madame Bonaparte (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1879), 142, courtesy of Lance Humphries]

When
attempting to piece together the stories of a neighborhood such as
that of Ann or of Fountain Street, and the wharves where the ships of
Fell's Point entered and cleared their cargoes of wheat, flour,
coffee, sugar, slaves, immigrants, and merchandise from around the
world, it is helpful to have a series of good maps and surveys that
graphically (and accurately) depict the lay of the land, and the
buildings on the streets and in the alley-ways, to accompany the
mining of contemporary knowledge of the activities of the Port as
reported in such local publications as Joseph Escaville's
Price-Current (1803-1830) and as advertisements in the local
newspapers.

Baltimore
is fortunate in that it had a succession of civil engineers and
surveyors who tried to accurately map the city as it developed and
persistently re-shaped its urban landscape. The first were two
Frenchmen, refugees from the slave revolts in the French West Indies
and the revolution in France, A. J. Folie and Peter
Charles Varlé
. They were followed by Thomas Poppleton, an Englishman, and
Fielding Lucas, a native of Fredericsburg, Virginia, whose work was
mostly derivative from Poppleton’s map, although Lucas’s maps
prove to be more accurate as to the waterfront as it was in the 1820s
than Poppleton whose remarkable survey of 1822 was intended to show
the configuration of blocks not yet staked out or developed,
including depicting fill land along the waterfront that as yet did
not exist. An example of Poppleton's projected development on his
1822 wall map, is the shipyard basin into which Alice Anna street
ended before it was filled in and the street extended. What
Poppleton shows as fast land did not materialize there until the
1830s. It was in this basin that some of the most famous of the
Baltimore privateers were built by Thomas Kemp who came to Baltimore
in 1804/5 from the Eastern Shore. George Gardner, Kemp's erstwhile
partner, continued to build ships at the same place on the basin well
after Poppleton’s map was published in 1822, moving down towards
the point as the land was eventually filled in.

Still
Poppleton’s map is so well executed that it can be overlaid on
Google Earth with remarkable accuracy. In 1855 Poppleton’s map was
re-issued with corrections and the addition of the lots created from
fill land beyond those that had been called for on the original
edition. It too overlays well on Google Earth.

For
the purposes of this story, the focus is on residents of two streets
during the first sixty years of the history of Fells Point, that of
Ann and Fountain Streets, as well as brief reference to six of the
many wharves that populated the waterfront of Fells Point, Jackson's
wharf, Biays's old and new wharves, Water's wharf, and Craig &
Barron's wharf. In the stories of those wharves is encompassed the
growth of the domestic slave trade, the perils of nature enhanced by
the municipal grading of new streets, and the export of Point built
ships to populate the navies of South America.

For
orientation without access to Google Earth on-line, Fielding Lucas’s
map of 1822, works best, an annotated detail of which follows here
keyed to the places touched upon in this story.

In
the last quarter of the 20th Century, Robert Eney with the able
assistance of a large number of people, including the late
Bryden Hyde and Michael Trostel, both distinguished architects and
architectural historians, reversed the late nineteenth century
addition of a third story to 812 Ann Street, seen here in this 1930s
publication celebrating the history of Fells point), and revealed the
wonderful small two story brick structure visible on Google
Earth.

The
story of the first owner of the Robert Long House has long been
known as far as the records known to date reveal him, although
describing him as a merchant at the time in 1781 that he sold the
house to William Travers, might not suit him as well as ‘builder,’
the 18th century equivalent of a modern day developer whose success
by 1781, permitted him to refer to himself as a “gentleman.” [BA
Land Records, WG G, 428] He says as much about his builder career in
his own words in 1782, when he deposes that “sometime in the year
seventeen hundred and Sixty three” he “came to Fells Point
with a view to settle and Purchase some lotts --That the Streets were
staked out at the corners by having two stakes at each corner and one
stake between every lott.” He goes on to explain that he assisted
in laying out the foundation of at least two houses between 1763 and
1781, not including his own. [Coyle, Records of Baltimore Town, pp.
44-45]. It is likely that Robert Long never lived in this house for
long if at all, but built it for rental or for sale. When he married
a rich widow, Mary Norwood, he placed the house, the lot (145) its
content, and its slaves in trust for his bride as part of the
marriage contract, in case they had a falling out and the marriage
failed. The marriage lasted and she may have lived in the house,
with the furniture and slaves, but only for at best seven years
years during the American Revolution until her husband sold it and
the lot to William Travers (probably a merchant/planter originally
from Maryland’s Dorchester county on the Eastern Shore) in 1781
(see the title to the Robert Long House on file at the Preservation
Society).

The
house was situated on lot number 145 as originally laid out by the
original developers of Fell's Point, the Fell family. The story of
the Fell family is complicated, but much of the early promoting of
the sale of the lots can be attributed to the widow Ann Fell for whom
Ann street is named, and who re-married a Bond, after whom Bond
Street is named.

There
is a plat of the original layout of the lots at the Baltimore City
Archives which can be easily related to Google Earth and is annotated
here to show the locations of Lot 145 on which the Robert Long House
was built, and Fountain Street where Thomas Kemp sub-leased his
shipyard from the Biays's in 1805.

While
the Point had begun to grow as a center of wheat and flour exports by
the time of the Declaration of Independence, most of the activity of
the Port during the war was focused on the privateering exploits of
its merchants and ship captains.

It
is with the Revolution that Baltimore, and especially the residents
of Fells Point, begin to earn their reputation as government
sanctioned privateers on the high seas, raiding British shipping and
engaging in clandestine trade with the West Indies. In 1906 Charles
Henry Lincoln compiled his list of the Naval Records of the
American Revolution, a list that Pratt librarian Bernard
Christian Steiner drew on for his Maryland Historical magazine
article on the Maryland Privateers during the American Revolution
[MHM, June, 1908, volume III, issue no. 2, ff.99]. The image of the
American privateer successfully eluding a British warship, while
probably of a later period, well-illustrates the tactics of the fast
sailing Baltimore built privateers that brought fame and fortune to
the Point. It depicts the raising of the American colors on the
privateer, as the privateer departs, having attacked what it thought
was a merchant ship while flying false colors. The merchant ship
turned out to be a British warship and the unsuccessful chase ensued,
with the privateer flying a pennant “Catch Me Who Can,” and free
to find another, hopefully unarmed, prey.

Beginning
with registration in 1778, the first 41 letters of marque empowering
Maryland ships to act as American government sanctioned armed
privateers were issued to Baltimore owners, masters, and charterers
of ships. The port also became a depot for supplying the American
army with flour, an activity that led to charges, possibly true, that
a leading lawyer and member of Congress from Maryland (Samuel Chase)
used insider information to corner and profit from the market in
wheat. Baltimore and the Point from its earliest beginnings had
a reputation for speculation and pushing the envelope of permissible
trade that would stay with it well into the 19th century, especially
in relationship to dealing with rebels in South America in their
fight against Spanish rule after the war of 1812.

The
most dramatic and prolonged expansion of the mercantile and
shipbuilding activities of the Point witnessed by the occupants of 812 Ann Street would take place after the
defeat of the British in 1781 at Yorktown.

It
is to the Travers family and in particular Jane Biays Travers
(1758-1845) that credit should go for living in the house at 182 Ann
Street for the longest of any single occupant, possibly beginning as
early as her marriage to Matthew Travers in September 1784. That was
about the time William Travers apparently failed to sell the house
and lot to anyone else, and instead deeded the house to his two sons,
Henry and Matthew, both of whom were ship captains in the employ of
Jane's two brothers, Joseph (1752-1820) and James Biays (?-1822).

Although
there is no direct proof that Jane was their sister, the
circumstantial evidence that she was is very strong, including the
care with which Joseph protected her interest in the house prior to
her husband disappearing. Initially Captain Matthew Travers’
earliest address (1796) is given in the directories as being on
George (now Thames) Street, and he did own outright a portion of a
lot on the street, but it is not clear that there was anything built
on it until after he sold it, and it is quite possible that the garden of 812 Ann Street (then numbered 3 Ann Street) ran down to
George Street, misleading the compiler of the directory as to what
address to specify. In any event, by 1803, Matthew and Jane
Biays Travers were definitely living in the house at what is now 812
Ann Street. Matthew disappeared around 1811, probably at Sea.
Jane remained in the house until she died 34 years later, in
1845, raising at least four daughters in the meantime.

Jane
was literate and a respected member of the community, so much so that
while Matthew was away she was the only woman resident in 1797 to
sign a petition to the Mayor and City Council to do something about
the “stagnated water” on George Street “that in the hot season
renders it unhealthy in that neighborhood.” Her brother James
Biays signed it as well.

The
summers in Fells Point could be brutal and deadly, as evidenced by
the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1800 (see Death
and class in Baltimore: the yellow fever epidemic of 1800,
by

D.
F. Stickle,Md
Hist Mag.
1979;74(3):282-99). It is possible that Jane escaped to James
Biays’s estate in what is now the Waverly section of Baltimore, but
then was in Baltimore County which he named Mount Jefferson,
reflective of his deep attachment to the President and his party.

If
you prospered in Baltimore, the pattern was to invest in a farm or
estate in Baltimore County, although some, such as the Ship builder
Thomas Kemp and the Winder family, found their respites on the
Eastern Shore. Indeed there is a remarkable coincidence if not irony,
in the fact that the Talbot County slave Frederick Douglass,
would begin acquiring the means to escape to freedom by working in
the shipyard of Baltimore’s Kemp’s erstwhile partner, George
Gardner, when he returned to Baltimore in 1836, after having suffered
his worst treatment as a slave just over the fence from Kemp’s
Talbot County estate [a
free recording of Douglass's narrative is available from Libravox].

If
Jane did retreat at times to her brother's estate, Mount Jefferson,
in what is today Waverly, she would have had as neighbors, other
Fell's Point investors, ship captain John Smith (employed by her
brothers and a resident of Philpot Street), and William Jackson whose
Fell's point wharf was made infamous by slave dealer Austin Woolfolk.

Maryland
State Archives, msa_c2843_15_1

James
Biays's estate in Baltimore County off of the York turnpike

James and Joseph Biays even manage to secure an act of the
legislature passed in 1805, permitting them to build a road from Bond
street to York road (now Greenmount) in order to facilitate getting
county produce to market and reaching James's country estate. The
road was wiped out by the development of the city eastward of the
Jones Falls and to the north of the Point, but it appears to be
clearly marked in orange on Poppleton's 1822 map of the city.

Joseph
and James Biays's road from Bond Street to the York turnpike?

How
literate Jane Travers was, is not known, and the whole question of
how women of her generation became educated, especially in Baltimore,
has yet to be studied in any depth.

Jane's
sister-in-law, Susanna (1767-1845), the widow of her husband’s
brother, Captain Henry Travers, was identified as a school teacher in
the city directories until she died the same year as Jane, 1845, at
the age of 78, nine years Jane’s junior. The newspapers reveal
that in the early years of the 19th century there were a number of
schools for women and the Bias brothers received permission from the
General Assembly to run a lottery to establish an academy for women.
Whether or not it succeeded is presently not known. That white boys
who populated the streets of Fells Point were able to read the
newspapers is clear from Frederick Douglass’s narrative of his life
on Aliceanna (Alice Ann) and Philpot streets in the 1820s and 30s,
and that his white mistress, wife of the Ships Carpenter/builder Hugh
Auld, could read, but for the majority of the women who lived
in Fells Point there is no clear indication of how literate they
were. A good guess is that more women than men could read and write
in those seafaring times, when a majority of those who signed
seamen’s articles prior to a voyage could only sign with an ‘x’.

source:
British Admiralty papers relating to a Baltimore prize ship
captured during the War of 1812, British National Archives

It
is also not known whether Jane attended church, but the Biays’s
were active Presbyterians. Joseph had a pew in the First Presbyterian
Church in the 1780s. When later, James left with a portion of the
Congregation to form the Second Presbyterian Church because of a
dispute over who should succeed the previous minister, brother Joseph
followed.

The
pastor James Biays and others chose for the new Second Presbyterian
church came highly recommended by Thomas Jefferson, for whom
the Biays’s were aggressive political supporters. Both Joseph and
James served on the city council as Jeffersonian Democrats, and were
paid by the City for a multitude of civic works including the grading
and paving of streets, the silt from which may have led in part to
their financial undoing.

The
Second Presbyterian church was a congregation composed of some of the
most active seamen/entrepreneurs of their day, as well as one of the
most distinguished jurists ever to serve on the Maryland bench,
Theodrick Bland. In his role as a circuit court judge, diplomat to
the rebellions in South America (scene of some of the more dubious
trading ventures from Fell's Point and the inner harbor), and as the
erudite Chancellor of Maryland, Bland was accused (but never
convicted) of aiding and abetting those Baltimore merchants and ship
captains who supplied the Revolutions in the Caribbean and South
America.

In
the careers of Captains Henry and Matthew Travers, who do not appear
to have been members of the 2nd Presbyterian church, it is
possible to catch a glimpse of the successes and failures of the men
who sailed the ships from Baltimore. Both worked with the Biays
brothers, although Henry ultimately deserted the Point for Virginia,
selling out his interest in number 812 Ann Street (then numbered 3
Ann) to his brother and sister-in-law Jane Biays Travers. When
he did so, Joseph Biays placed the house in a trust for Jane to
protect it from Matthew’s creditors, and to ensure her ability to
claim the house in the event of Matthew’s death or desertion. When
Matthew did disappear about 1811, possibly at sea, Joseph turned the
house over to Jane and the property remained in her possession until
her death, although she did sell off portions of it over time until
it measured only the width of the house and she had to share a
chimney with a neighbor.

Matthew
and Henry, along with other captains that worked for James and Joseph
Biays, had colorful careers that are documented in the newspapers of
which by the time of the War of 1812, there were several dailies and
a price current that documented the fluctuating prices of goods and
the entrances and clearances of ships to and from the port of
Baltimore.

In
many ways the masthead of Joseph Escavaille ‘s Baltimore
Price-Current
which
graced his first issue on Valentine’s day 1803, could very will be
an artistic rendition of Jane and Susanna Travers, contemplating the
fate and fortunes of their ship captain husbands.

Source: microfilm, Maryland Historical Society

Sadly,
not all the issues of the newspapers of Jane’s day have survived,
and while a large number of those that have survived are on line, a
significant number of those that were probably read in Fells Point
have not been, and are widely scattered in the inaccessible stacks of
a number libraries out of state. An example is the radical newspaper
the Whigwhich
may contain advertisements and announcements related to Fells Point
that were not carried by its competitors.

What
the surviving newspapers do tell us about politics in Jane’s day is
the devotion of the Point to the party of Jefferson and U. S. Senator
Samuel Smith, the organizer of Baltimore’s successful defense
against the British in 1814, and the last Mayor of Baltimore known to
ride horseback to face down one of the crowds that gave Baltimore the
national reputation of being Mob Town.

The
editor of the Federal Republican newspaper, Alexander Contee
Hanson would blame James Biays for the attack on, and destruction of,
his printing press in the summer of 1812. The vitriol that
Hanson spewed across the pages of his newspaper in attacking the
administration’s path to war with Britain was too much for the
residents of Fell’s Point and elsewhere in the city. He was not
the first person in town to suggest that mob was more an organized,
politically motivated expression of democracy than ill-educated
drunks on a rampage.

One
of the first organized protests against the British impressing
American seamen for the British Navy and to serve in disrupting
American trade was in Fells Point in 1810. Three years before
an American Ship, the schooner Nimrod of Baltimore registry,
was in port, returned from a voyage to the West Indies with a cargo
of sugar, cocoa, coffee, sarsaparilla and hides.

When
it went to sea again it carried a Spanish certificate that was
intended (illegal from the standpoint of American Maritime law) to
provide it with some protection against capture by the British as it
may have been carrying a cargo of flour intended to feed Wellington’s
army. The ruse did not work and the Nimrod
was captured, condemned in an Admiralty court, and sold as a prize
to the British Navy, which in turn converted it to one of its cutter
class sending it in 1810 to Baltimore for supplies and possibly
dispatches. The story of what happened when the Netley,
formerly the Baltimore schooner, the Nimrod,arrived
in port went viral, making newspapers all over the country from
Savannah to Boston.

Isaac
Munroe, who in 1812, would come to Baltimore as a Republican editor
and founder/owner of the Baltimore Patriot, was , in 1810, editor
of the Boston
Patriotnewspaper.
Recently a volume of issues of his Boston Paper was sold at auction
for $1150 which included this editorial:

“British
Arrogance...

It
is probable that the British cutter Netley was sent to Baltimore to
insult us; because, we are told, she was once a Baltimore schooner
[the Nimrod], taken by the British and since cut and medelled into
her present hermaphrodite shape; because, she came here ostensibly
for Copenhagen Jackson, who was known not to be here: and because she
brought some impressed American with her, and had the audacity to
tantalize them with a view of their own native shores!

This
latter circumstance being made known to the patriotic sea-boys at the
Point, a deputation waited on the Lieutenant of the Netley, and
demanded the release of a Marylander detained on board – he
demurred, and but one hour was allowed him to decide. This bold
summons was obeyed; the poor sailor was released, after being sixteen
years in slavery! His friends are said to reside on the East Shore;
he had made seven unsuccessful attempts to escape, and was as often
lacerated for his pains.

Could
it be ascertained, as it is suspected, that this is the same vessel
on board of which captain Rider was taken and flogged, there is
spirit enough among our seamen to blow her up; but, the proof not
being clear, they practise their usual moderation.”

With
James Bias at its head, an organized posse of residents of Fells
Point visited the Netleyand
freed the sailor. James Bias claimed that it was all done
properly without violence, but the Anti-Jefferson editor of the
Maryland
Republicanwas
far from convinced.

Alexander
Contee Hanson, jr wrote a flaming editorial about Biays’s own
published account of the Netleyincident
in the September 19, 1810 issue of the Federal Republican

James
Biays, of Fell’s Point, a notorious coward, and unprincipled bully,
has issued one of the most false, insolent and seditious publications
witnessed since the days of Robespierre and the revolutionary
histories of the Parisian suburbs. In conclusion, he threatens
us with the sanguinary vengeance of the Point. We wish this
wrteched patron and leader of mobs to understand, once and for all,
that we should despise ourselves, if we did not [defy him and] all
his adherents.

Three
days later in another editorial, Hanson excoriates the “Fells Point
rabble” and again denies that the reception of the Netleywas
anything but peaceful

It
is no wonder that as a leader of the local militia (referred to as
Major, and then later as Colonel when he is active in the defense of
the city in 1814) that James Biays was involved in the thick of the
attack on Hanson’s printing press in the summer of 1812, clearly an
organized riot that soon escalated into the assault on the jail, the
severe beating of Hanson, and the death of a Revolutionary War hero
who happened also to be a staunch Federalist.

There
is no question that for nearly a quarter of a century the Biays
brothers played an instrumental role in the politics of Fells Point.
As early as 1798, they were actively engaged in advocating active
political participation of the ‘mechanics and manufacturers of the
city and precincts of Baltimore.’ At a mass meeting in September
1798, with James Biays in the chair, those assembled vowed to resist
“the unwarrantable and degrading means” that “have been
adopted and resorted to by some persons, to influence” the
upcoming Congressional Elections.

The
Biays brothers, who began their careers as ship joiners, made their
fortunes in the commodity export and import trade that was centered
at Fell's Point and was the major factor in the growth of the city
following the American Revolution.

The single most important exports
were wheat and flour. The demand for housing at the point
accounts for why the Pennsylvania builder, Robert Long, came to
Fells Point and invested in the lots laid out under the auspices of
Ann Fell, wife of the owner of the point. He and other Pennsylvania
imports such as Dr. Henry Stevenson, along with local investors like
the catholic and protestant Carrolls, recognized that the wheat
produced in Western and Central Pennsylvania and the conversion to
wheat of the tobacco plantations of Maryland’s Eastern Shore could
make Baltimore and surrounding mills into a major factor in the
export to the West Indies and to Southern Europe of American Wheat
and Flour, drawing to it a large urban population in need of housing.
In return the commodities and finished goods purchased with the
proceeds of the export trade would accelerate the import
trade for consumption by the local population and distribution to the
interior of the country, first by the waterways and the national
road, and then by canals and the railroads financed in part by
investors from the City. The results in the growth of the city and
personal fortunes were phenomenal, especially when combined in the
years leading up to the war of 1812 with a re-export trade as a
neutral power acting as carrier and supplier for all sides during the
Napoleonic Wars.

In
population and export figures alone, the growth of Baltimore City
with the bulk of trade and shipbuilding focused on Fells Point, was
dramatic. It grew from a few houses and a couple of ships in
1765, to a population city wide of 50,000 by the time of the British
blockades of 1813-1814, and hundreds of ships, many of which were
locally built. Most of the larger ships were tied up at Fell's Point
wharves.

Jane’s
husband, Matthew Travers, and his brother Henry are typical examples
of entrepreneurial ship captains. They commanded ships that traded
for cargoes of wine at Bordeaux, sugar, coffee, and hides from the
West Indies and from the cost of Central America. They had
considerable independence and often carried cargoes of their own for
sale on their own account. Sometimes they disobeyed orders and
it got them into trouble.

Henry
Travers was sued by his employers for not following their
instructions. Sometimes they had a bit of good luck such as the time
on his way to Savannah Georgia, Matthew came upon a ship abandoned at
sea and brought her into port as a salvage prize which the Admiralty
Court awarded to him and he sold to his personal profit.

Sometimes
the captains felt they did not get the compensation they deserved.
Consider the case of Captain John Smith who lived on Philpot
Street, owned land adjacent to James Biays's in Baltimore County,
and sailed in partnership with James Biays. He became quite
disillusioned with Biays, suing him in the Chancery Court for about
$70,000 in back pay for services rendered the Biays firm. The
case deserves a story of its own and contains a well documented
history of the voyages of several ships under Smith’s command
including an audited account of the profits attributed to each
outgoing and incoming voyage. It will never be known how the
case was settled, but it was out of court and the papers submitted by
both sides lay in a folded case file unrecorded until rediscovered by
the Maryland Archives staff in the 1970s. The details can be found
on-line at: http://virtualarchive.us/mdsa_s512/html/index.html

Among
the letters introduced as evidence is one addressed to Mrs. Smith on
Philpot Street which demonstrates the literacy and the affection of
both, as well as his concern for the health and welfare of his
recovering daughter. Smith wrote from the port of Philadelphia to
his loving wife. The letter is well worth reading in its entirety.
It is in a nicely formed, well spelled, and largely grammatically
correct hand. It illuminates the ways in which the Captain handled
commissions and receipts of sales and it makes clear the ways in
which ship captains of the Point looked out for each other, sending
news about them to their families. He even gives instructions on
what he expected his wife to oversee at the “country seat”
including putting it in good order, planting good trees, for them
that is broke, and that she should “try to rent the old house for
any sum …”

When
Jane Travers left the house on Ann Street and walked north to Fleet
street , over the course of her nearly fifty years as a resident she
would have seen little change in the composition of the neighborhood
until near the very end of her life. The names would change, but
the occupations remained virtually the same. From the city
directories which are now all searchable on line it is possible to
reconstruct who lived where and their occupation with a reasonable
degree of accuracy subject to the vagaries of the directories
themselves which are often riddled with phonetic spellings and
some years more complete than others. Only in 1804 did the compiler
of the city directory organize the entries by street and street
address, all other directories were alphabetical by last name.

source:
1804 Baltimore City Directory

In
walking up Ann Street towards Aliceanna (Alice Ann) and Fleet Streets
she would pass boarding houses for sailors, corner stores and
taverns, and the homes of ship captains, ship carpenters, rope
makers, scriveners, butchers, customs officers, and a school
mistress. In 1819 she might stop at the house north of
Aliceanna on the east side that was occupied by ship captain Richard
Johns’s family, and may also have been the home a few years
before of a relative, Captain John Cock. Captain John Cock
disappears from sight, perhaps at sea, after the death of his son in
1818, leaving to his relatives water colors of his ship the Canada
depicted on a voyage to Bordeaux in 1817, as well as a painting by
the black portrait artist Joshua Johnston of Cock’s is deceased
son, Richard Johns Cock, that could well have been hanging on the
walls of Captain Richard Johns’s house on Ann Street.

courtesy of Edith Johns

Further
on Jane might turn the corner on Fleet Street, walking east toward
the water of one of the busiest ship building basins in the
city. Looking closely at Folie’s 1792 map of the point there
is a bluff or hill near the intersection of Fleet and Washington
streets.

detail from Folie, 1792

Slightly
below this bluff or hill, James and Joseph Biays leased the rights
to the land on the basin , subleasing in turn in 1805 to one of the
best known and most prolific ship builders of the day, Thomas Kemp
(1779-1824). There Kemp and his partners built some of the fastest
and best known privateers of the the War of 1812 (for example, the
Chasseur, better known as the Pride of Baltimore).
According to Toni Ahrens careful study between 1805 and 1817 when he
semi-retired to the shores of Talbot County, Kemp filed the required
carpenters certificates for 64 vessels.

The
property leased to Kemp lay 360’ to the East of Washington Street
between Fleet and Fountain Streets. The shipyard was to the south of
his property on the water of the cove or basin as it was called
occupying fill land that probably became annexed to his lease hold
property by adverse possession. The configuration of the properties
off Fountain Street by 1826 can be seen in this overlay of Google
Earth with a plat submitted in at court case that reached the Supreme
Court. Kemp's lease hold was to the north of Fountain Street at its
very Eastern end. The Shipyard was in all likelihood to the south
shown with the wharf on the plat. All that land was fill land as the
edge of basin was moved forward towards the Patapsco river.

Plat from Barron v Baltimore overlaid on Google Earth showing the damage of the 1817 freshet

Kemp
employed free blacks, slaves and white laborers at his shipyard.
Initially the neighborhood of Fountain street was an integrated
neighborhood of free blacks and whites all associated with ship
building, except the keeper of the fountain who first appears in the
1804 city directory as B. Davis, doubling as a keeper of a wharf.

It
is at the Kemp shipyard that Frederick Douglass first began to learn
the shipbuilding trade, although he did not become a skilled caulker
of ships until he moved to Price’s shipyard further south on the
Basin after a bruising encounter with white apprentices at
Kemp's.

Jane
Biays Travers’s house on Ann Street was in the 8th Ward for most of
the time of her residency. Thomas Kemp’s shipyard was in the
Seventh. Both wards had slaves according to the 1813 tax list, with
243 in the 8th Ward and 472 in the Seventh. Jane owned no slaves
according to the tax list. She may have seen, possibly even
recognized, Frederick Douglass who had vivid memories of the slaves
marched in the dead of night to the Savannah and New Orleans packets
tied up at Jackson’s wharf off of Thames street, which lay next to
James and Joseph Biays’s old wharf. Their ‘new’ wharf
was built at the end of Alice Anna street, south of the land they
leased to Thomas Kemp. The packets to Savannah and New Orleans from Jackson's wharf (and also nearby Price's wharf),
were filled by commission merchants including Henry Thompson of Clifton Mansion
fame, and Austin Woolfolk, whose ads soliciting slaves for export to
Georgia and New Orleans begin as early as 1815.

When
Douglass lived on Philpot street and worked at the Kemp and Price
Shipyards he wrote that

In
the deep, still darkness of midnight, I have been often aroused by
the dead, heavy footsteps and the piteous cries of the chained gangs
that passed our door…

on
their way to Jackson’s wharf. In fact Jackson’s wharf may
have been the site of the most famous of the Abolitionist exposes of
the slave trade that William Lloyd Garrison published in Baltimore
featuring one of Thompson and Woolfolk’s cargoes on board the
Francis (a Rhode Island ship) destined for New Orleans. Garrison was
sued for libel in the Baltimore County Court and fled to Boston to
establish his newspaper the Liberator and continue his crusade,
leaving his mother behind to whom he sent an allowance she deposited
in the Bank of Baltimore.

A
typical example of the slave cargoes exported from Jackson’s wharf
by Henry Thompson and by Austin Woolfolk were the 187 slaves sent to New
Orleans aboard the Intelligence between 1821 and 1827 of these
only 18 were identified by surnames. The rest by their given
names. They included a number of infants and children, and one
voyage in 1823 stopped at Sotterly plantation on the Patuxent river
to pick up 29 slaves sent south for sale by John R. Plater. [For the
names of slaves and their shippers/owners see Ralph Clayton's Cash
for Blood, and his account of the fountain on p. 48.]

Back
on Fountain Street, prior to 1817, the Biays brothers expanded their
wharf at the end of Aliceanna Street and received permission from
the city for a monopoly on delivering water from their Spring to the
residents of the Point. In the Niles Register for 1813, the
most highly regard weekly journal of its day, Hezekiah Niles not only
defends the city against those who would call it mob town, he also
waxes eloquent about the Fountain and the Biays’s efforts to supply
the Point with pure water:

Just
where the Fountain was actually located near Fountain street is not
known for certain. The reason is probably the torrential rainstorm of 1817
which produced a freshet of sediment so powerful and so full of mud
and debris that it resulted in the destruction of the Biays’s wharf
at the end of Aliceanna street, and the silting up of a number of
wharves on the west side of the Basin.

Jehu Bouldin Plat of 1826 showing the loss of Biays's new wharf and the extension of Aliceanna street over fill land below where the Kemp shipyard had been

One
such Wharf was that of Craig and Barron. Eventually that wharf was
dug out, and as late as 1826, thousands of residents and slaves of
the city including Frederick Douglass, would witness the launching of
a Brazilian funded warship initially called the Baltimore, It
was so large that a sand bar of silt in front of the wharf had to be
dug out before it could sail down the bay, captained by none other
than Navy Captain Franklin Buchanan of U.S. and Confederate Navy fame
who kept a journal of his voyage to Rio now in the Archives of the
Naval Academy in Annapolis.

That
Craig and Barron were displeased by the mud that clogged their wharf
is an understatement. They instituted a suit for damages in the
Baltimore county Court against the city arguing that the grading of
the streets by the city provided the dirt that was washed into the
basin. A jury awarded them damages. the city appealed and the
Court of Appeals reversed the lower court in favor of the City. The
lawyers for Craig and Barron then appealed to the Supreme Court under
the provisions of the fifth amendment that required that no property
can be taken without due process and just compensation. It was the
last major case heard by Supreme Court Justice John Marshall. He
refused to hear the case and the arguments the City was prepared to
make through its lawyer, Roger Brooke Taney, who would succeed
Marshall on the Court as Chief Justice.

In
1831, another Supreme Court case ended involving seamen's wages which
dated back to 1806 and the ill-fated voyage of the Warren from Waters
Wharf at the very tip of the point that gave Fell's Point its name.

Cleared for the West Indies, the voyage of the Warren proved to be a
compelling story with which Jane Travers and the residents of Fell's
Point would have been most familiar. It probably was the talk of
every tavern and table where seamen were lined up to sign the
articles that detailed their wages for a voyage. The owners of the
Warren promised the seamen and their captain, Andrew Sterett
of Baltimore, a Navy officer on leave, that it would be a trading
voyage to the pacific northwest with an ultimate destination of a
profitable sale of the cargo in China, probably Canton. It turned
out to be a smuggling venture to Chili, where the seamen, once they
were informed of the real instructions, refused to go further. They
were thrown into jail, many for a total of three years, before they
were released. Their captain, son of a prominent Baltimore family,
committed suicide rather than participate in the clandestine
operation any further. Eventually the seamen sued for their wages
which by Admiralty law continued until they returned to their home
port of Fell's Point. Finally, after a quarter of a century
without pay, the Supreme Court decided in favor of the seamen. By
that time all the principal owners were bankrupt, many sailors were
dead or not to be found, and the Federal Court had no enforcement
powers. It proved to be Pyrrhic victory, especially for the
surviving seamen, although, as usual in such cases, the lawyers for
both sides probably profited. The story is documented in full at the
digital commons of the University of Maryland School of Law athttp://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/mlh_pubs/47/.
It is a classic example of the degree of risk and the manner of
taking it that was commonly practiced by the first two or three
generations of the shipbuilding merchants of Fell's Point, if the
voluminous records of the Admiralty side of the Federal Courts are to
be believed. One of the principal owners of the Warren was Lemuel
Taylor who Betsy Patterson claimed “caused
the ruin of half the people” in
Baltimore.

As
far as shipbuilding was concerned, for an undetermined amount of
time, George Gardner continued to build ships at what had been the
Kemp shipyard just south of the eastern end of Fountain Street.
Apparently it had not been adversely affected by the freshet of 1817,
but the Biays fountain as described by Niles completely disappeared
by 1822, and had been replaced in 1819 by the fountain at Pratt and
Eden street at a cost to the City of $34,000.

Over
time, and by about 1833, the year Barron vs. Baltimore was dismissed
by the Supreme Court, the marshy land to the south of Fountain street
was filled in and Fountain street itself extend to the length it is
today. By the time Jane Travers died in 1845 the whole character of
the Point was changing. While ships continued to be repaired and
built in its shipyards, the adventuresome nature of its trade and the
entrepreneurial activities of its ship captain/merchants were on a
steep decline. If the summers had been bad on the health and senses
of the community before 1845, by the time of her death guano as
fertilizer had begun to appear piled high on its wharves. While good
for the depleted fields of rural Maryland and Virginia, it gave a
new and not very welcome dimension to the smells of summertime.

There
are hundreds of thousands of history-less people who live, die, or
pass through a city like Baltimore and its subdivisions such as
Fell's Point. At times it is only by accident that a glimpse of
their lives and their personal histories emerge. Take for example
Margaret Temple, a close neighbor of Jane Biays Travers who lived in
Argyle Alley just to the north and slightly west of the rear of
Jane's property. Somebody found the record of her marriage in
England in 1809 and several letters to her in Fell's Point beginning
with one dated 1833, and ending with a letter from an English nephew
written in 1854. They are mostly about property in England from
which she apparently did not derive the benefit she expected, and
letters from her son, a carpenter, who ventures out in search of his
fortune in Florida, but eventually settles back at the Point. Where
they came from, no one knows. They might have been found when her
Argyle alley house was renovated. They were deposited anonymously at
the Maryland State Archives by an employee who died without
retrieving them for their rightful owner. Their value lies in
making them available virtually with links to the fragmentary
documentation of Margret's and her son's lives that may be found in
city directories, tax records, probate, and census records. This
can be done quite simply and inexpensively through the virtual world,
but as in the case of the history of the house on Ann Street and the
wharves of the point, their must be sustainable virtual archives
somewhere that will contain both the stories and the documentation of
those stories for the enlightenment and enjoyment of the public now
and in the future.

As
to the history of the lost neighborhoods and forgotten residents of
Fells point, the advent of the virtual world and the viability of a
permanent electronic archives mated with inexpensive space within
which a collaboration of researchers and writers can work is at hand,
if only those who need it are willing to make it so. With good base
maps, continued assistance from Google, and whatever comes after
Google, for cloud storage, open source software, and virtual mapping
linked to a research and writing wiki, it will be possible to tell
more and better stories about the community of Fells Point, past,
present, and beyond.

History
is best told in stories that resonate with the listener whether it is
through the written word or the virtual world of interactive web
sites and digital productions of sound and images.

May
we work together in both a sustainable physical and virtual world to
make it so through insisting on, and paying for, a permanent virtual
archive to hold our memories and the surviving documentation. We owe
it to ourselves and to those who come after us.

The
walking tour on Sunday, March 29, began at the Robert Long House,
then down Fell Street to the Harbor, and around the perimeter of the
original lay out of Ann Fell Bond's lots, stopping to reflect on the
Waters, Barron & Craig, and Biays's new wharves; the site of
Kemp's ship yard, Fountain Street, the oldest wooden houses on the
point, the first Jewish synagogue across from Ann Fell's lot no. 1 on
the corner of Bond and fleet, and then down Bond street (following
the first Fell lots) to the park at the end of Bond street on the
water to reflect on the sites of the Jackson and Biays Old wharves,
as well as the view of what was once Philpot street where Frederick
Douglass lived as a teenager. A map of the walk was provided: